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Tuesday, August 2, 2016

GETTING OUT: A Tough Row to Hoe For An Ex-Con in The Seeing Place's Provocative Production of an Early Play by Marsha Norman

Candice Oden and Erin Cronican

As much as anything, Marsha Norman’s 1978 play Getting Out –
about a woman trying to pull her life together after serving an eight-year
prison term – is a feminist cry for selfhood from someone who has very nearly
lost hers.This lesser known work by the
playwright who five years later would receive the Pulitzer Prize for ‘night,
Mother is being given a richly layered production at the Lynn Redgrave Theater
by The Seeing Place, a gutsy independent theater company that strives always to
dig deeply into psychologically complex works.

Erin Cronican both directs and stars as Arlene, so tightly
wound and passive in the early scenes that you might think she is trying to
disappear altogether.As the play opens,
she is getting settled into a dumpy apartment in Kentucky, far from
the prison where she was incarcerated following a conviction for second degree
murder.We learn very quickly that the irritatingly
unassertive Arlene we meet is what remains of the enraged and rebellious Arlie,
her younger self, played in parallel, sometimes overlapping scenes by Candice
Oden.

The playwright does not make it easy to sympathize with
either Arlene (who has a penchant for falling into every trap laid out before
her) or for Arlie, with her vicious and explosive temperament.Can Arlene truly believe that Bennie (Leo
Goodman), the prison guard who quit his job and drove her 500 miles to her new home, is just being a Good Samaritan and doesn’t want anything else of
her?Can she be sucker enough to return
to her former boyfriend and pimp Carl (Steve Carrieri), who fathered the child
she gave up to foster care?And can she honestly
imagine that after all this time she will be able to be reunited with that
child?

As for Arlie, we can easily see why she winds up in solitary
confinement at the prison.She is a
caged tiger, a danger to anyone with whom she comes into contact.And even as we get to know something of her background –
victimized by a physically and sexually abusive father and the other men in her
life, and rejected by her embittered mother (Carla Brandberg) – she is still
someone with whom we would not want to spend much time.We can be sympathetic in theory, but please
don’t force us to deal with her.

Arlene’s only lifeline is an upstairs neighbor, Ruby (Jane
Kahler), herself an ex-con.Unlike
Arlene, Ruby understands the reality of her situation, the necessity of
managing on a low-paying dead-end job as a restaurant worker, and doing the
best she can to make herself as comfortable as possible by passing the time playing
cards and watching television.She
reaches out a hand of friendship to Arlene, who has been so battered by life she
doesn’t even know what a no-strings friendship can possibly mean.Arlene also does not comprehend what a terrible mistake she has made by completely turning her back on the
rebel-with-a-cause Arlie, her discarded self whom she literally attempted to sever from her personality. (For this, she has to thank yet another man, the well-meaning but damaging prison chaplain.)

Now in its seventh season, The Seeing Place is able to draw
on a pool of talented New York actors. The cast as a whole is very good, with standouts
being Ms. Brandberg as Arlene’s mother, showing us both her bitterness and
her grudging effort to be supportive; and Mr. Carrieri as Carl, embodying both threat and sexual allure,
so that we can see why Arlene is tempted to take up with him again.

Neither the playwright nor this production offers easy
solutions, only reminding us that as a society we are perfectly willing to toss our ex-cons –even those like Arlene who are deemed to be "completely rehabilitated" – back into the same environment that led to their downfall in the first place.We all know
about the high rate of recidivism for such as Arlie/Arlene, especially when
they are left adrift with few prospects upon release, so her future is
unpredictable at best.Only the tiniest shred of hope remains.Feel free to share this blog with your friends, and to offer up your own theater stories by posting a comment. I also invite you to check out the new website Show-Score.Com, where you will find capsule reviews of current plays from Yours Truly and many other New York critics.